'Fun Home' launches its luminous national tour in Cleveland with its idiosyncratic beauty intact (review)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - When "Fun Home" opened on Broadway a year and a half ago, the intimate, deeply personal musical was staged in the round in the Circle in the Square Theatre, a space smaller than some high school auditoriums.

It won five Tony Awards, including best musical, and made history when composer Jeanine Tesori and bookwriter and lyricist Lisa Kron became the first all-female writing team to win a Tony for best score.

An unlikely hit, "Fun Home" isn't a big, brassy show. It's a fragile microcosm, the story of a family as odd and yet, somehow as familiar, as you'll ever meet. In that way, it behaves more like a play than the typical Broadway tuner; it's more Tennessee Williams than "Wicked." You could say it's a musical for people who say they don't like musicals.

REVIEW

Fun Home

What:

The KeyBank Broadway Series presents the first national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical.

Music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. Directed by Sam Gold. Based on the 2006 graphic memoir, "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel.

When:

Through Saturday, Oct 22.

Where:

Connor Palace, Playhouse Square, downtown Cleveland.

Tickets:

$10-$100. Go to playhousesquare.org or call 216-241-6000.

Approximate running time:

90 minutes with no intermission.

The question on everyone's minds as the touring production launched in Cleveland this week was whether it could play in houses four times the size of its Broadway address.

(When "Once," another intimate, anti-musical musical made its way across America in 2013, the sounds of that sweet shimmering hootenanny were swallowed up by the echoing dimensions of regional showplaces.)

Does "Fun Home" forge the same emotional connections with audiences on the road?

The answer, in the brassiest of terms, is a cymbal-crashing, trumpet-blaring YES. Director Sam Gold's production is a triumph of reinvention from its lovely structural bones to its all-new cast. (Gold won a Tony for helming the original Broadway production.) There is no other show like it - it is as beautiful and tragicomic and idiosyncratic as the Bechdels themselves.

Like "Next to Normal," "Fun Home" traverses dark territory. It's no spoiler to report that in the early beats of the musical - and on page 22 of Alison Bechdel's essential, 2006 graphic novel upon which the musical is based - we learn that Alison's dad Bruce, who runs the Bechdel funeral home, kills himself by stepping in front of a truck. (The title of the epic comic and the musical comes from the nickname Alison and her brothers gave the morbid family business.)

One of the story's most tragic aspects is that as the closeted Bruce slides into despair, Alison is just discovering her own burgeoning sexuality, tentatively coming out at Oberlin College, where she hooks up with her first girlfriend.

With her father's death following so hard on the heels of her own "doleful coming-out party," Bechdel writes, "I could not help but assume a cause-and-effect relationship."

The musical is narrated by an older Alison played, improbably and with wry humor and depth, by a former Miss America, Kate Shindle.

"Caption: My dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town, and he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I . . . became a lesbian cartoonist," Alison deadpans.

(The real Bechdel, seated in the orchestra at Playhouse Square's Connor Palace Wednesday night, said she found the casting "delightful.")

Now 43, the stage Alison searches for answers in a past cluttered with her father's reclaimed antiques and her own conflicting memories. (Who better than the daughter of a funeral home operator to exhume buried family secrets?)

She picks through those memories just as her Dad used to paw through junk in neighbors' barns looking for tarnished gems; she watches herself in rural Pennsylvania as Small Alison (a straightforward and winning Alessandra Baldacchino, reprising the role she played on Broadway) and later at Oberlin as Medium Alison (the astonishing Abby Corrigan).

Rather than contracting the set to maintain a sort of feigned intimacy, scenic designer David Zinn expands it, boldly using the entire space, including the exposed brick of the theater's back wall.

That wall is used to startling effect in "Edges of the World;" in Bruce's shattering swan song, his shadow looms huge and black behind him, the man he can't shake. The brick surface is also a canvas for the only piece of Bechdel's artwork seen in the show, a moving drawing of Alison and her father. It's a welcome echo from the 2013 Off-Broadway production at the Public Theater, lost when "Fun Home" transferred to Broadway.

The "Fun Home" orchestra - compact and marvelous under music director Micah Young - shares the stage with the actors on a raised scaffold.

The polished furniture and salvaged tchotchkes collected by the mercurial Bruce (Robert Petkoff, brittle and heartbreaking all at once) are crammed into every corner of the Bechdels' restored, rambling Victorian on Maple Avenue. (A collector like Bruce always wants more as Alison sings early on in the show, but all the silver coffee pots and damask linens he can find can't fill the hollows in his heart.)

The feeling is one of barely controlled chaos; something is always threatening to upend the perfectly positioned bust of Quixote on the mantle.

Welcome to our house on Maple Avenue, the family sings before a momentous visit from an emissary from the Allegheny Historical Society.

See how we polish and we shine.We rearrange and realign.Everything is balanced and serene.Like chaos never happens if it's never seen.

Not only does Gold's new "Fun Home" reflect the precise psychological landscape of the Bechdel household, it preserves the emotional resonance of the piece.

The songs - Tesori's ingenious collage of repeated themes and musical styles, from waltz to '70s pop - don't just land in the 2,800-seat theater, they explode.

In "Days and Days," Alison's mother Helen looks back on the wreckage of her life and pleads with her college-age daughter not make the same mistakes.

Don't you come back here, she warns.

I didn't raise youTo give away your daysLike me.

The song, delivered with devastating honesty by Susan Moniz, is almost unbearably poignant.

That marrow-deep sorrow is leavened by the uncorked joy of "Changing My Major." Alison leaps out of the closet in an encounter described in the song Tesori wrote as a lilting, transporting waltz buoyed by Kron's irresistible lyrics.

Changing my major to Joan.I'm changing my major to sex with Joan.I'm changing my major to sex with Joan.With a minor in kissing Joan.Foreign study to Joan's inner thighs.A seminar on Joan's ass in her Levis . . .

As Medium Alison, "Changing My Major" is Corrigan's tour de force. (That she's 18 and a recent graduate of the Northwest School for the Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina, makes the transporting performance even more extraordinary.)

Her saucer-round brown eyes never blink as she drinks in a sleeping Joan (an effortlessly sultry Karen Eilbacher) draped across her dorm room bed. Dressed in a decidedly un-sexy striped T-shirt (the unifying pattern worn by all the Alisons), high-waisted briefs and striped white tube socks (my favorite period touch) the young actress sings like a seasoned diva captured in the morning glow of a long spotlight.

I thought all my life I'd be alone," she sings with wonder.

Has any song in the American theater ever captured the feeling - and the ridiculousness - of first love better?

We won't need any foodWe'll live on sex alone . . .

The true greatness of "Fun Home," in its triumphant New York stand and in this equally gorgeous, life-affirming production, is its ability to tell an exquisitely specific story that is also universal.

Yes, it's the story of a lesbian cartoonist whose closeted father kills himself and it's also the story of what it means to be a part of a family - how to survive the wounds of filial bonds while capitalizing on their gifts. In Alison, we relive that terrifying, clarifying moment when we realized our parents were real people, with failings and regrets and unfulfilled dreams. So like us.

Scored to the rhythm of life, "Fun Home" is the story of what it means to be human.

At a time when the country feels stretched to breaking by the differences that divide us into states red and blue, a reminder of the humanity we share is a very good thing. This is the show America needs to see.